While Mudde claims
that he did “some serious reading on the issues” of the Ukrainian far right,
his “literature review” seems to draw – not exclusively but for the most part –
upon my own research published some time ago. My current research, however, has
been largely ignored.

Here I will focus on
several statements by Mudde in his article:

“In ideological terms
Svoboda is quite similar to the other parties that it collaborates with in the
Alliance of European National Movements (AENM), such as the British National
Party (BNP), the German National Democratic Party (NPD), and the Italian
Tricolor Flame”.

This is partly true.
However, Svoboda no longer cooperates with the AENM, as Svoboda has been
stripped of its observer status in the Alliance in early 2013 by Hungarian far
right Jobbik. Svoboda is opposing the Kremlin’s influence in Ukraine, while
Jobbik is now cooperating with Russian Eurasianists such as Russian fascistAleksandr Dugin who is calling for the annexation of several parts of Ukraineto Russia. Jobbik is also against the EU and would rather have Hungary join the
Russia-led Eurasian Union to be established in 2015. The reason behind Jobbik’s
decision to block Svoboda’s cooperation with the AENM was exactly the
ideological conflict: Svoboda is pro-EU and anti-Kremlin, while Jobbik is
anti-EU and pro-Kremlin. Furthermore, the German National Democratic Party has
never been a member of the AENM.

“Svoboda is not even
the most extreme far right group represented in the new Ukrainian government.
Pravyi Sektor (Right Sector) is a coalition of mostly smaller far right groups,
including various neo-fascists and neo-Nazis, which came together during the protests”.

While the Right Sector
has indeed a neo-Nazi fringe – constituted by the representatives from the “White
Hammer” group, “Patriot of Ukraine”/Social-National Assembly – the main group
behind the Right Sector is “Tryzub” (Trident) which is far from neo-Nazism,
racism and anti-Semitism. Its ideology can be interpreted as national
conservative. Furthermore, nobody from the Right Sector is represented in the new
government.

“[The Right Sector] has
presented itself as the defender of Euromaidan, but has also been linked to
much of its most violent actions, including against other (radical left)
demonstrators”.

Defending Euromaidan implied
readiness to be engaged in violence against police brutality, so this sentence
is logically wrong. The protesters had to resort to violence, because otherwise
they would have been murdered by the police and thugs. And around one hundred
protesters (they are now called the Heavenly Hundred) have indeed been murdered
by the police and criminal thugs (titushki) hired by the regime. Some of the
protesters have been beheaded; some have been tortured to death; some have been horribly abused.

Among the
Heavenly Hundred one will find fallen revolutionaries of ethnic Ukrainian,
Russian, Belarusian, Armenian and Jewish origin. Mudde seems to completely fail
to grasp the gravity of the tragic situation at Euromaidan. Moreover, even the
misleading and alarmist article by Volodymyr Ishchenko, to which Mudde refers,
does not say that the Right Sector attacked radical left protesters. On the
contrary, there was a truce between the Right Sector and the far left who fought
together against the common enemy, Yanukovych’s criminal terrorist regime.

“The leader of Pravyi
Sektor, Dmytro Yarosh, a 25-year veteran of Ukrainian far right politics, was
appointed Deputy Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, which
advises the president on the national security strategy of Ukraine”.

This is not true. As of today, Yarosh
was not appointed Deputy Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council.

“In line with a
nationalist view of Ukrainian history, Parubiy wrote that: “All people
interested in history know that Stepan Bandera was in a German concentration
camp during the Second World War, while his brothers were shot dead by the
Nazis”.

Bandera was indeed arrested
by the Nazis in 1941 and later put into the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, while his
brothers were indeed killed in Auschwitz. This is not “a nationalist view of
Ukrainian history”, these are historical facts.

“Not only do far right
parties in Ukraine have a popular support that is well above the EU average,
although only half of that in some west European countries (like Austria and
France), the main far right party is more extreme than most of its ‘brethren’
within the EU, and occupies significant positions of power within the new Ukrainian
government and state”.

First of all, Mudde seems
to be unaware of the fact that popular support for Svoboda has dramatically
dwindled during 2013, while Svoboda’s leader Oleh Tyahnybok’s presidential
rating has fallen from 10.4% in March 2013 to 3.8% at the end of January –beginning of February 2014. Despite the sensationalist, Kremlin-inspired reports claiming
that Ukraine was facing “a neo-fascist coup”, Svoboda has been discredited
during the revolution and it will hardly be able to regain the support it enjoyed
in 2012. Second, Svoboda may be more extreme than the French National Front or
the Freedom Party of Austria, but it is probably less extreme than Jobbik, NPD,
Golden Dawn, Tricolour Flame, BNP, etc. Finally, even if certain members of
Svoboda are indeed represented in the current government, one should understand
that this government is transitional and has to deal with only two major
problems in new Ukraine: (1) the Kremlin-backed separatism and (2) the economic
crisis. I hope that the early parliamentary elections will take place shortly
after the presidential elections, and popular support for the far right Svoboda party may decline. It is important not to forget that Svoboda’s successat the 2012 parliamentary elections was largely driven by anti-Ukrainian and
pro-Kremlin policies of Yanukovych’s regime, rather than by alleged right-wing
radicalisation of the Ukrainian society.

I have recently written
two articles in which I address most of these issues in a more detailed manner.
They will be published next week.

We call upon all those who have either no particular interest for, or no deeper knowledge of, Ukraine to not comment on this region’s complicated national questions without engaging in some in-depth research. [...] Reporters who have the necessary time, energy and resources should visit Ukraine, or/and do some serious reading on the issues their articles address. Those who are unable to do so may want to turn their attention to other, more familiar, uncomplicated and less ambivalent topics. This should help to avoid, in the future, the unfortunately numerous clichés, factual errors, and misinformed opinion that often accompany discussions of events in Ukraine.